Transit Point Moscow

When I read this book it was nearing the end of the cold war. I still feel it hits home today! True story about an American that gets suckered into a counterfeiting scheme and ends up being caught by the Soviet Secret Police. Having many similarities to Midnight Run, the American gets sent to a Soviet prison camp in one of the barren, frigid areas of the USSR. His story inside the prison is so compelling that one has to wonder why it hasn't been made into a film. I don't want to spoil the end but obviously he eventually gets out or the book couldn't have been written.

If I were going to pick something really stupid to do, I'd say that smuggling heroin through Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union would surely qualify. This book lets us see the typical consequences of such rash activity.I found it full of humourous incidents (probably more so for the reader than for Amster), very valid and fair in its take on Russian culture, and almost always credible. All this adds up to a very entertaining read. Amster is a semi-sympathetic character at best, but this doesn't detract from the book, because the portrayal we see adds to its credibility: no one would make up some of the experiences he details, yet he does not portray his captors as being particularly better or worse than he. He and they are just *there*, and have to deal with one another, and all the expected variety of human qualities is present.The only persons I can possibly think of who would not like this book would be those who hope to use it as a source for the brutality of the Gulag system. Solzhenitsyn's _Gulag Archipelago_ would be the far better choice in that case; Amster definitely wasn't in the Four Seasons Hotel, nor even a Motel 6, and his life was definitely unpleasant, but he wasn't dragged to a torture chamber every day. Moreover, as an inmate in a 'foreigners'' camp, he didn't see a clear picture of the mainstream Gulag system of the times. Probably the two above points are correlated to a degree.For everyone else, this one is worth a search. Adventure travel fans in particular will probably enjoy it even though it's not precisely in that genre.

A surprisingly humourous book about an American caught for heroin smuggling in 1970s Moscow. Whilst the main character is unsympathetic (he is headstrong, commits stupid crimes for thrills and uses others to gain advantages) the story is an interesting aspect of "Labour Camp Literature" and worth reading. This book was written long before the collapse of the USSR, so I wonder if Gerald Amster has found what became of his friends and adversaries in the Gulags.